Key Earth Systems Issues To Be Debated at Conference,
Dec. 14 to 18 Will Evaluate the Biosphere 2 Laboratory as Potential Multi-User
Facility

TUCSON,
AZ.  Top scientists from universities, international
research institutions and the U.S. Department of Energy Laboratories, will gather this week with leaders of national and international
programs in integrative climate change science at Columbia
Universitys Biosphere 2 Center to debate key Earth systems
issues and evaluate the Biosphere 2 Laboratory as an inclusive
multi-user facility, it was announced today by Biosphere 2
Center President and Executive Director Dr. Barry Osmond.

Contrary to their expectations, scientists on a research cruise
to the Arctic Ocean have found evidence that the Gakkel Ridge,
the world's slowspreading mid-ocean ridge, may be very
volcanically active. They also believe that conditions in
a field of undersea vents, known as "black smokers," could
support previously unknown species of marine life.

Boulder,
Colo.It's exciting to be the first scientist to observe
a volcanic eruption on an ultraslow-spreading mid-ocean ridge,
an event in and of itself that rarely occurs. Even better
is discovering that the USS Hawkbill, a submarine equipped
with scientific mapping tools, just happened to have passed
by at the same time and recorded the event while the scientists
on board were completely unaware of the eruption.

E-seminar
provides a new learning experience that crosses departmental
lines.

"Figuring
out whats happening to the planet and what to do about
it is a pretty complicated task," says Marc Levy, Associate
Director for Science Applications at CIESIN, the Center for
International Earth Science Information Network, a unit of
the Columbia Earth Institute, by way of explaining why CIESIN
decided to create an online seminar on the topic of environmental
sustainability. "No one department will cover all the
problems of planetary sustainability, but it turns out that
Columbia has an intering bunch of people working on this
problem from several angles."

The
Arctic Ocean is one of Earths least explored oceanic
frontiers. Last summer, a research team aboard USCGC Healy,
the U.S. Coast Guards newicebreaker, exceeded its
most ambitious hopes to map the oceans floor and reveal
geological and biological features of the underwater Gakkel
Ridge during a research cruise funded by the National Science
Foundation (NSF).

Live
webcast on November 28th, at 1:00pm .Click
here to go to the NSF's webcast page.

On
September 11, seismographs operated by Columbia Universitys
Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, New York, recorded
seismic signals produced by the impacts of the two aircraft
hitting the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, and the
Towers subsequent collapse. While the ground shaking
was consistent with the energy released by small earthquakes,
it was not sufficient to cause the collapse of or damage to
the surrounding buildings, as some have thought. Rather, the
buildings around the Twin Towers were impacted both by the
kinetic energy of falling debris and by the pressure exerted
on the buildings by a dust- and particle- laden blast produced
by the collapse.

The
Hudson River is not the gangster graveyard it is often portrayed
as being. Nor is it merely a toxic wasteland, saturated with
PCBs. The Hudson is a dynamic river where remnants of
a glacial past, invasive zebra mussels and underwater dunes
more reminiscent of the Sahara Desert, come together. Its
like a universe unto itself. In the next few years, its
expected that there will be environmental changes that impact
on the dynamics and use of the river.

The
USCGC Healy, carrying 6 Lamont scientists and students, reached
the North Pole on September 6. The historic occasion marked
the first time a U.S. icebreaker has broken its own way to
the North Pole. In addition, this was Healy's maiden scientific
voyage. The expedition departed Tromso, Norway in July to
collect rock and sediment samples from the seafloor along
the Gakkel Ridge, the earth's slow-moving mid-ocean ridge
system.

Stuart Pimm is an optimist. In his new book "The World According
to Pimm: A Scientist Audits the Earth," Pimm forecasts that
unless proactive measures are taken, 50% of the species on
the earth will be on a path to extinction by the middle of the 21st
century.

For
the first time, a team of scientists, including six from Columbia
University's Lamont-Doherty
Earth Observatory, will enter the Arctic Ocean with two
scientific ice breakers to collect rock and sediment samples
from the seafloor along the Gakkel Ridge, the earth's slow-moving
mid-ocean ridge system.

Keeping
chickens and especially dogs out of the bedroom could help
reduce the risk of Chagas disease infection in rural areas
of Central and South America, according to a new report in
the July 27 issue of the international journal, Science.

Global
losses from natural hazards continue to rise rapidly, despite
significant scientific and engineering advances. With the
ablishment of the Center
for Hazards and Risk Research, the newaddition to
Columbia's Earth Institute, researchers hope to revolutionize
the ways in which hazards are defined and analyzed and to
help communities around the world protect against hazards.

The
Bush Administration's energy plan, which contains 105 initiatives
ranging from loosening regulations on oil and gas exploration
to tax credits for fuel-efficient cars, contains "thought-provoking
ideas - both good and bad," said Roger Anderson, director
of the Energy Research Center at the Earth Institute's Lamont-Doherty
Earth Observatory.

Seismological
data from earthquakes as far away as the former Soviet Union
can now reach scientists at Columbia's Lamont-Doherty Earth
Observatory (LDEO) in near real-time due to a new joint research
effort between Columbia and Borovoye Geophysical Observatory,
a former Soviet monitoring station in northern Kazakhstan.

By reconstructing a DNA
sequence that existed more than 450 million years ago, a Columbia
University research biologist has revealed how new hormones
emerged during evolution, concluding that the female hormone
rogen
is the most ancient of all steroid hormones but that its role
in differentiating the sexes from each other developed much
later.

Columbia University researchers have discovered
unusually rapid growth in recent times in trees from the remote
alpine treeline fors in Mongolia, indicating that temperatures
in that region rose to their highlevels in the past century.
This latstudy, which provides a detailed record of annual
temperature-related growth fluctuations from the third century
to today, is the first of its kind for this region of Eurasia.

In
the wake of mudslides that devastated Caracas, Venezuela,
in December of 1999, 38 students and faculty from Columbia's
programs in Urban Planning and Urban Design and from the Lamont-Doherty
Earth Observatory will travel to Caracas, Venezuela, to
help the local government create a long-range plan to redesign
the neighborhoods and transportation systems that were decimated
during this natural disaster.

Finland, Norway and Canada
are the top nations in environmental sustainability, according
to a 122-nation study by a consortium of analysts, including
Columbia's Center for International Earth Science Information
Network (CIESIN). The United States was ranked 11th, just
behind Denmark and one place ahead of the Netherlands.

Manhattan
and Queens, NY experienced a minor earthquake at 7:34 A.M.
Wednesday January 17, 2001. The magnitude was 2.4, the instrumental
location of the earthquake was the upper east side of Manhattan
at a depth of approximately 7 kilometers (4.3 miles). The
earthquake was located near to the 125th Street fault and
it is possible that this fault was the source of the earthquake.

About
a thousand years ago, a hurricane of cataclysmic proportions
swept up the Hudson River. Or
perhaps it was the mother of all northeasters. No one knows.
What is clear, however, is that the force of the storm was
beyond any recorded or remembered human experience. Great
swaths of the river bottom were scraped up and moved about
in one ferocious flood.